The Last Dial-Up

Come September, 160,000 Americans lose their dial-up internet. AOL's finally pulling the plug.

That's 160,000 people who heard that BEEP-SCREECH-BEEBONG every day for decades. Who waited three minutes for a photo to load. Who got kicked off when someone needed the phone.

And I keep wondering, maybe they knew something we didn't.

Dial up internet

Think about it. Dial-up had natural limits. You couldn't doom-scroll at 2 AM—it was too slow. You couldn't work from bed: someone might need to call. The internet ended. It had edges.

My mom used to yell at me to get offline so she could use the phone. That friction? That was the point. It made us choose what mattered.

Now we're always on, always available, always consuming. The internet doesn't end—it just follows us everywhere. We traded those annoying boundaries for invisible chains.

Those 160,000 holdouts weren't behind. They were the last people who could still hang up.

So what do you think? What did we really lose when we lost the dial-up sound?

Let me know on jamesabrown.net. On that note, I'm James A. Brown, and as always, be well.